Fetch using Gitlab API

Motivation

I use gitlab, and I have many repos that I need to track on daily basis, or even more than once per day. I found it so tyring first of all to clone all those repos when I change my working machine, and then to keep all these repos up to date. For that reason I began to write an automation script to do the boring tasks of my shoulders.

Process

I started with a simple bash script, which go through a for-loop and do the stuff, where the paths of the repos must be hard-coded.

This was fast and worked for a while, but when I got to work with multiple projects, and my co-workers added/removed/renamed a repo, it was sill manual work to update the script, and as boring as I am, I did not like it, and looked for a lazy way to automate the process, and opened the Gitlab API-Documentation, where the fun started.

Solution Idea

A python script to talk to the gitlab API, and use the /projects end point to access the repos.

Requirements:

• Gtilab Token: create a private token first to use it accessing the API as explained in the docs.
• Virtual access to the repos (e.g.: gitlab.com)

Optional:

• Pipenv to install the dev-dependencies:

brew install pipenv

First Try: argparse

The first try was to pass the options as arguments to the script:

Usage:

usage: main.py [-h] [--token TOKEN] [--url URL]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --token TOKEN, -t TOKEN
                        Gitlab private Token
  --url URL, -u URL     Gitlab URL<Paste>

Second Try: JSON

Then I thought that the configurations must be more flexible, so the use of a separate config file make sense.

Full project repository can be found here

Usage

python main.py